The Fresno Bee reports: In a pointed new challenge, a Sacramento law firm is asking a judge to block Hernandez from describing himself as an ‘astronaut/scientist/engineer’ on the June ballot. The lawsuit notes Hernandez has left NASA.

What a fun trend this could be, minorities having to go to court for permission to publicly associate with their life’s work! There’s some job creation for you: Hernandez says on his Facebook page that it will cost $20,000 to hire lawyers to defeat the lawsuit.

Disgraced megalomaniacs like Newt Gingrich will still be referred to by their former titles such as ‘Mr. Speaker,’ but only as a special reward for being forced to resign his post in shame.

Also from the Fresno Bee excerpt:

‘Hernandez’s attempted use of ‘astronaut’ violates the Election Code’s unambiguous requirement that a candidate’s ballot designation reflect one’s current profession, vocation, or one held during the previous calendar year,’ the lawsuit states.

I don’t know if this is true or not, that it’s a violation of the Election Code here in California, but it seems like a childish quibble to me. [addendum]

As the article notes, he is the son of migrant farm workers. Inspired by the words of his father, he took American education seriously and eventually became what I consider to be a hero. (C’mon, a freaking astronaut qualifies as “Hero” in my book.)

Hernández, who is now running against incumbent Congressman Jeff Denham in the 10th Congressional District, emphasized how his parents influenced his education and career.

“I see a lot of me in you,” Hernández told the students who took part in the ‘Dream to be a Hero’ motivational talk organized by the Club Laitnoamericano del Valle Central. “I am not that different than you are.

We can’t have that, now can we?/

This is also part of what pisses me off about hard-core anti-immigrant assholes. Would that they had their way, we’d be minus one inspiring astronaut right now, and our nation would be lesser for it.

UPDATE: H/T Wrenchwench (thank you for this): Here’s Jose Hernandez talking about how he became an astronaut and why he’s running for Congress.

Tigger2005True, but you know what their response will be: "Well, if you hard-core liberal baby-killers had your way Einstein would have been aborted." (Of course you would think they'd be pleased about that, since Einstein was one of those evil ...

“And don’t think Oh, this is just something that happens in the Deep South.”

With the Bradlee Dean debacle still fresh in our minds, Sean Faircloth gives a very compelling speech on the subject of religious bullying of children, and how it is aided by the government and taxpayer dollars.

Achilles TangBullying children about religion is within the same right that people have to create children in the first place. Complaining about the results of what we generally call fundamental rights is called what...?//

“That was a cultural mindset that the space program brought upon us and we reaped the benefits of economic growth because you had people wanting to become scientists and engineers who are the people who enable tomorrow to exist today. And even if you are not a scientist or technologist you will value that activity, and that in the 21st century are the foundations of tomorrow’s economies and without it we might as well slide back to the cave because that’s where we’re headed right now, broke.”

A Salvadoran flag wrapped around his neck to block out the sun, Geremias Romero hunches low to the ground alongside the other laborers, following the tractor along rows of cantaloupes.

He reaches into the leafy green rows of fruit, touches a melon to gauge its ripeness, and then tosses it into a cart, where another laborer boxes it. Walk, pick, toss. The pattern goes on all morning.

Harvesting cantaloupes for $8.25 an hour isn’t the job that Romero, 28, dreamed of as a child. Born in Newark, N.J., to immigrant parents from El Salvador, he graduated from high school and has taken classes at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and Merced Community College. He has experience as a special education teacher but, unable to find a teaching job, he’s started working in the fields.

Hard work is OK
“I’d rather keep myself working than get in trouble,” he said, wiping his hands on his ripped jeans, stained with grass. “My dad started from nothing. He worked hard, so I don’t mind working hard, too.”

Many young Americans are finding themselves worse off than their parents were at their age, without jobs or working below their skill and education levels. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds is 17.4 percent, up from 10.6 percent in 2006.

The first was TJ. Then came Samantha, Aaron, Nick, and Kevin. Over the past two years, a total of nine teenagers have committed suicide in a Minnesota school district represented by Rep. Michele Bachmann—the latest in May—and many more students have attempted to take their lives. State public health officials have labeled the area a “suicide contagion area” because of the unusually high death rate.

Some of the victims were gay, or perceived to be by their classmates, and many were reportedly bullied. And the anti-gay activists who are some of the congresswoman’s closest allies stand accused of blocking an effective response to the crisis and fostering a climate of intolerance that allowed bullying to flourish. Bachmann, meanwhile, has been uncharacteristically silent on the tragic deaths that have roiled her district—including the high school that she attended.

—-

The anti-gay climate in the schools in Bachmann’s district has been so extreme that it has attracted the attention of the Justice Department and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

It’s a very sad and disturbing read, but an important one. We are failing our nation and our nation’s children by allowing this kind of demonization to continue.

FlaviaAnd you know conservatives are going to scream about why we're mentioning her, as if things that go on in her district that are a) serious enough to merit official attention & b) exactly the sort of thing that her ...

Since the advent of trendy theology in the 19th century, it has become fashionable to regard the Goldilocks narrative as just a story - that it didn’t really happen. Nowadays many Christians even dismiss it as a myth, yet they still call themselves Christians. This is an appalling state of affairs, and it is even more tragic that few of the major Christian apologists have tackled this issue head-on. It is time to set the record straight, and affirm the historical Truth of the Goldilocks narrative. I intend to show that it is overwhelmingly more likely that the Goldilocks story is literally true than not, and not only does it constitute Warranted True Belief, it is *necessarily* true in a deep ontological and cosmological sense, i.e. if the G3B model was any different, our universe would be deeply inimical to human life, and we would not even be here.

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.

The belief or worldview, McDowell said, forms values, which in turn drive one’s behavior. The worldview “is where we are falling down the most anywhere in the world.” So what is the prevalent worldview in America today? “There is no truth apart from myself,” that’s what even many young “evangelical, fundamental, born-again Christians” believe, he said.

While 51 percent of evangelical Christians did not believe in absolute truth in an earlier survey, the percentage escalated to 62 in 1994. In 1999, it jumped to 78 percent. “You know what it is now?” asked McDowell. “One of the most staggering statistics in history of the church… 91 percent said there is no absolute truth apart from myself.”

ODL! They’re coming for our children! Anyway, I’m guessing by “absolute truth”, McDowell means the literal, inerrant truth of the Christian bible. I must admit that I can not figure out what he means, or what he thinks he means with the phrase “there is no [absolute] truth apart from myself”. I’ve never met anyone who says or believes that their self is the only truth.

“Now here is the problem,” said McDowell, “going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”

So an increased wealth of information and knowledge is a bad thing? A level “playing field” of ideas, an equality of speech for all, is evil?

I suppose it’s no wonder certain politicians seek to cripple the internet in this country, if they see it as an easily accessible fountain of knowledge that threatens their religious supremacist stranglehold on this nation which may just unseat them from their obscene, privileged status.

HappyWarriorIf he were as strong in faith as he claims to be, he wouldn't be worried about atheists and otehrs on the internet but because he's a know nothing idiot, he feels the need to say this crap.

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From Sen. Schumer's Facebook page: There are two simple reasons the comparison does not hold water. First, the federal RFRA was written narrowly to protect individuals' religious freedom from government interference unless the government or state had a compelling interest. ...

UPDATE MARCH 30: NEW TIME FOR LIVE STREAM - 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) project will be flying a rocket-powered, saucer-shaped test vehicle into near-space from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on ...

What's this? Another article on Cracked about how incorrigibly tribal-minded us homo sapiens are? Well, yes. But the proverbial devil is in the proverbial details. Proverbially. It's still worth reading. That's what I'm getting at. Everyone is talking about Scientology ...

China attacks the biggest code repository in the world. After battling a distributed denial of service attack for four days, GitHub on Monday was able to restore normal service levels. The primary target of the assault is greatfire.org, which is ...

An American woman--presumably not Muslim, though she doesn't say one way or the other--married to a Libyan man is taken aback when her 9-year-old daughter suddenly wants to start wearing hijab. This is the story of how conflicted she felt ...

NEW YORK, March 27 (Reuters) - Big Wall Street banks are so upset with U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren's call for them to be broken up that some have discussed withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats in symbolic protest, ...

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, March 30 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a new challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare law that took aim at a bureaucratic board labeled by some Republicans as a ...

Depending on the outcome of a hearing scheduled for Monday, a 33-year-old Indiana woman could face up to 70 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage. Reproductive rights advocates say her case is a disturbing example ...

Spence Jackson, the chief spokesman for the late Missouri auditor Tom Schweich, died over the weekend from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jefferson City police said Monday they responded to a call Sunday evening at Jackson's apartment. They found ...

On Friday, Motherboard reve​aled that fully functioning Uber accounts were for sale on the dark web. Today, it appears that some people have fallen victim to fraudulent trips being made with their login credentials. "It happened this morning," Phil ...

Are conservatives anti-science? Spoiler: Conservatives aren't anti-science or pro-science. But, they are pro-common-sense. And once more scientists adopt common sense approach to science, they'll find that they have the support of conservative politicians - the people whose job it is ...

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Here is an interesting article on one of Tail Gunner Joe's sick witch hunts that has, unfortunately, been forgotten. I try not to feel schadenfreude of the fate of McCarthy's side kick, Ray Cohn, but I never succeed.

About the Graphic How should a woman try to get ahead in a male-dominated workplace? Perhaps the answer lies less on women "manning up" and more in how businesses value their employees. Many women confront this tension as they ...

If we accept the idea of Orthopraxy over Orthodoxy, then what does evangelism look like? What is the Witness of those who try to follow the Way of Christ Jesus? To evangelize is to spread the good news that we ...

A short column in The Nation that is a must read. The primary difference between liberalism and conservatism, at least in theory, is that the latter is an ideology and the former isn't. Conservatism, as Milton Friedman argued, posits that ...

This is a powerful admission of culpability and I applaud his courage in making it. It really should be read in its entirety. Glenn Ford should be completely compensated to every extent possible because of the flaws of a system ...

Sarah Vine of the DM gets it wrong: SARAH VINE: Teaching 11-year-olds about rape is a form of child abuse The problem with this country, I've come to realise, is that it treats adults like children and children like adults. ...